Cottage Farming

Even though the weather wasn’t great, we braved the drizzle of rain to mix the ingredients to make our growing medium for the square foot gardens. In case you haven’t read Mel’s book, the Square Foot Gardener, the medium is made from equal parts (by volume) of vermiculite, compost, and peat moss.

Since most of the ingredients were marked with their weight, rather than their volume, we had to estimate the relative amounts to mix together. Fortunately, it looks like we estimated correctly as the final product appeared to be just what we expected.

Unfortunately, however, our overall calculation for the amount was off by a factor of two. For some reason we underestimated the total volume needed for all three boxes, so we’re going to need to do the exercise again (and mixing it together can most definitely be considered exercise) next weekend.

As we had enough to fill one and half boxes, though, we went ahead and planted the first one. While we’re still germinating some seeds inside, we got a jump start by purchasing a few starter plants. So far, we have a couple different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower. Allyson also took over a couple squares to plant radishes and cucumbers.

Also, we found that while working around the boxes it could get kinda’ muddy. We opted to surround the boxes with large bark mulch so that we could walk around them without tracking too much of the mud back into the house. So far it worked out pretty well, plus it looks nice.

We did learn a lot about how to effectively mix the amount of medium we needed. I’m sure the next round will go more smoothly, and I’ll post any time-saving tips we come up with after having put them to the test.

As a side note from the “Coincidence Category”, I received a note from Steve Greenberg, my DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast co-host in response to a tweet over the weekend. Apparently, his wife is about a month ahead of us in the garden race… I guess we better step up our game.